A Book Review of Will Dollars Save the World?

Abstract

This book review presents an analytical assessment and critical interrogation of Henry Stuatt Hazlitt’s work, Will Dollars Save the World? Published in 1947, the work gives the readers an informed, legible, and relatively persuasive account of Hazlitt’s perspective on the disadvantages of an American-led economic recovery and rehabilitation of postwar Europe which, when seen from contemporaneous lens, makes his work part of the eccentric part of the published literature. Hazlitt tellingly formulated his arguments contrariwise to the Marshall Plan, which he considers as an offspring of the feeling of mutual reciprocity borne out of political and emotional entanglements of the American government during the Second World War with the war-ravaged European nation-states, not as a legitimate attempt to seize the opportunity to critically introspect the true reasons behind the pauperized economic conditions of these nation-states. Ultimately, regardless of being published in the mid-20^th century, Hazlitt’s riveting and eye-opening account of a polarized viewpoint of American economic relations with the postwar world evinced remnants of the perils of political initiative and other related spheres of action, which are still lingering on the 21^st century world.